There is no shortage of books about coping with death. Joan Didion’s devastating account of the year following the demise of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, comes to mind. Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye, a memoir about her then-55-year-old mother’s death on Christmas Day in 2008 from metastatic colorectal cancer, is equally profound and heart-wrenching. Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal and Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air — each written from a medical professional’s perspective (and in Kalanithi’s case, also as the dying patient) — pushed the boundaries of our collective understanding about what it means to confront and even learn to embrace mortality.

Still, there is always room for more. Two new titles — Yiyun Li’s novel Where Reasons End and Han Kang’s The White Book — are among the most inventive and thought-provoking books I’ve read on the subject. Equally compact at less than 200 pages each, they take a good, long, hard stare at death and mourning on a micro-personal level.

Where Reasons End is, perhaps, the continuation of a conversation MacArthur Fellow Li has been having with herself (and, in turn, us) for years. In 2017, she published Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life, a collection of essays in which she described, among other things, two suicide attempts and a lifelong battle with depression. Just a few months after the book was published, Li’s 16-year-old son killed himself.

In the weeks following his death, Li started crafting this latest work. It’s a highly analytical — to the point of being almost sterile — imagined dialogue between a mother and her 16-year-old son, Nikolai, who took his own life. “I wasn’t feeling fine,” the mother writes. “I had but one delusion, which I held on to with all my willpower: We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I’m doing it over again, this time by words.”

Photo: Agence Opale, Alamy Stock Photo

The similarities between Yi’s circumstances and the book’s narrator’s don’t end there. “Mommy” is a Chinese American writer by trade. She’s also obsessed with dissecting language and prone to word-churning. (Think Lorrie Moore, but dark instead of funny.) As in here: “It occurred to me that I had never looked up the etymology of the word settle, so I did. I read it to him: from Old English, setlan, from setl, seat — to seat, bring to rest, come to rest. Can parents’ hearts find repose after the death of a child?”

In a text whose sole purpose is navigating loss, this laser-like focus on semantics can be both surprising and mildly aggravating. Instead of revealing the details surrounding Nikolai’s death or giving his mother real estate to openly grieve, Li builds mini fortresses of words as barricades against unwieldy emotions.

For example, she hints at Nikolai’s inner demons — and Mommy’s response to them — this way:

“Perfect. Imperfect. A pair of adjectives that come over and again, in all seasons, day in and day out, taunting us, judging us, isolating us, turning our isolation into an illness. … I wish you had made me an enemy, I said, rather than yourself. Mothers, I thought, would be perfect for that role.”

“You can’t be that for me, Mommy, Nikolai said. I’ve found a perfect enemy in myself.”

In other sections, the two discuss dreams, Nikolai’s love of blueberries and playing the oboe, the inadequacies of self-help books and frustrating nature of clichés, the Oxford comma. By the end, the combination of the book’s emphasis on minutiae and its predisposition toward circular philosophizing had a numbing effect that — at least for me — felt both eerily familiar and deeply unsettling.

But to be fair, that’s kind of Li’s point. After all, isn’t that what mourning — and writing or talking about death — is? A maddeningly individualized and mostly inexplicable experience? As she so eloquently writes: “One can and must live with loss and grief and sorrow and bereavement. … But there is something else, like a bird that flies away at the first sign of one’s attention, or a cricket chirping in the dark, never settling close enough for one to tell from which corner the song comes.”

In contrast to Where Reasons End, Han Kang’s third novel — after The Vegetarian andHuman Acts — is an entirely different reading experience. Though even more spare in structure, The White Book uses the relationship between words and time as a portal to break death — and the panoply of fraught emotions that come with it — wide open.

At its core, the story focuses on the death of its unnamed narrator’s older sister two hours after her birth. Though the event happened years before the narrator was born, the impact of the tragedy sent ripples through her life, affecting her thoughts into adulthood and influencing her output as a writer: “This life needed only one of us to live it. If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now. My life means yours is impossible.”

But like Li, Kang doesn’t spend too much time dwelling on what actually happened aside from a few choice paragraphs — at least directly. Instead, she jumps back and forth through time, crafting a series of meditations on words associated with grieving, memory and the color white — “swaddling bands,” “white bone,” “small white pills,” “blizzard,” “ashes,” “shroud” — to poke and prod at the spaces in between loving and loss, knowing and the unfathomable, feeling and hollowness, in order to better understand impermanence.

Photo: Park Jaehong

The result is mesmerizing. A breath cloud becomes “proof that we are living.” A fallen handkerchief becomes “a soul tentatively sounding out a place it might alight.” At times a string of sentences or an image created is so startlingly beautiful that it demands not only a lengthy pause in which to ponder its meaning, but a multitude of readings.

There’s also another layer. The White Book is autobiographical. Mirroring the narrator’s experience in the text, Kang worked on the manuscript during a writer’s residency in Warsaw. Much of the incandescent writing throughout not only reflects the narrator’s vulnerable state as she wanders the Polish city’s streets (and, in flashbacks, those of Seoul), but also Kang’s: “I felt that yes, I needed to write this book and that the process of writing it would be transformative, would itself transform into something like white ointment applied to a swelling, like gauze laid over a wound,” she writes.

As a package, Kang’s ghostly The White Book is a force to be reckoned with. It demands every bit of your attention. But it also accomplishes something quite unique. It flows through your consciousness like a snowflake, a white butterfly, that handkerchief — settling there, then floating away up into the ether.